Back in the days when we still had dreams, when Gabriel Garcia Marquez was God, we'd stare out over the sprawl of London town and fantasize of a great and joyous sorrow when the scent of bitter almonds would come our way too. As yet unwise to the three-card trick and the sleight-of-hand, we accepted magic and marvelled over where things went and the mysteries of death and the universe. And that's how we were, in that break of youth, in a time of magic, when Gabriel Garcia Marquez was God.

I didn't know who she was. She'd sometimes just appear, be stood there, smoking and looking out to the farther world. “Imagine all those lives going on out there,” she'd say, closing her eyes and blowing her smoke through the evening. “All the fuck-ups and those with nothing but the distance to keep them going. O, I want to be something, to do something. The beauty of this life is too terrible to do nothing. We've an obligation... A duty.”

And we all felt like that. Like life branched out from there in a thousand different directions from a thousand different tributaries. With every book we read and every name we learned and every word we mastered, it all seemed to be leading somewhere, to some thing, to a changing of the guard. There was an excitement and a fervour in everything we did. Our own thoughts excited us. England and what lay beyond excited us. Music and art and literature and philosophy excited us. And most of all, the cyanide of love and its promise to come excited us. It was as if we could build something impossible together. That if only we had someone to hold onto through desperate nights then the morning would always come and tomorrow would be an antidote to yesterday. For a while back then, even poverty felt kind. We grew and became more complex and more brilliant with the less we had. We fostered fantastic lives and adopted fantastic roles within them. If we had no coffee to wake up to we'd make homemade lemonade. And we were happy to wake; to see the world through newborn eyes, to make sure our folly was real.

- - -

“Read to me,” she would always ask through those great hot stuffy nights when the moon wasn't long enough in the sky to cool the city. “I've great dreams,” she would say, “and I know you do too.”

And so I would read, and the words would transport us to holy places and each night promised some mighty breakthrough that filled us with a queer kind of hope that we had no right to feel. On occasions we'd play music in an unknown language, close our eyes and imagine a carnival of life.

“What do you see?” she would ask. I would tell her of men on stilts in top-hats and Union Jacks, singing foxes and black midgets with muskets. I'd tell her of the longing sound of a ship's horn and the crashing wild of the sea and of flying fish and a journey to strange lands of rituals and death. “We're gonna get out of this place,” I'd say, and she'd smile and silently weep and look up at the moon and dream along.

“It's all bullshit,” I'd tell her.

“What? What's bullshit?”

“The moon. That we went to the moon. But it's a nice story.”

“It is,” she would say. “It is a beautiful story, isn't it... it's one of the very best.” And then she'd break down from some unknown melancholy and we'd both be lost then.

Nights like those did something to us. They brought in an all-knowing and savage poetry. They let us know, without a doubt, that we were prisoners to so much more than the economy and our little slither of town. We understood that we could be ripped apart by our emotions, by our lovers, by our mothers and fathers, by unrequited love, unrequited anything. We understood that the pursuit of the dream is often the death sentence and that romantics die such terrible deaths, always.

Well, the winters came and the winters went and once in the middle of March it snowed. For a while I lived with a lover in a room with no windows, with nothing but an old hairdryer to defrost our fingers and toes. We tee-pee'd the covers on our bed and spent most of our days sitting under there, reading and talking and inventing a world outside that appreciated art and repaid suffering and was waiting for us to emerge. We believed these things. We collected the rotten, discarded fruit from the market and we drank black tea and that is how we passed the bad days and convinced ourselves that those to come would be so much better. And then they came.

- - -

He had lost his mind and he used to tell me this terrible story, the only story he could remember to tell. He was on the Falkland Island, running across the flat peatlands of Goose Green with a hundred kilos of kit while being peppered with machine gun fire. He told me of the early morning sun and the burning gorse and of his escape from the anarchy and madness of men and countries. When he was finally free of the bullets, collapsed down into the safety of shelter, he spoke of this great melancholy that descended upon him, of how safety and mortality had not saved him, but had left him looking back and yearning to run the lottery of that machine gun fire once more. His comrades had been cut down and his Commanding Officer taken out in the first steps. He had lost too much to ever be able to celebrate survival. He was ashamed of his survival, had lost himself in that desperate race across burning terrain, screaming for sanctuary and life and the comfort of his mother.

I'd repeat that story to people and choke up as I told of those last words, that the truth is that the summer will kill us and rob of us of our essence. Escaping the war is no success, and being rewarded for words will not guarantee there'll be more to come. Our art and romance is safer in the doldrums, is more sure when you’re starving and drug-sick and your lover hangs on to your dreams and madness only because it's too hard to turn back. And our summer will come... Our summer is on its way. It is bleeding into the last of the winter and I tell you now, the heat will roll in soon and our skins will brighten and our minds will heal and we'll have a blast when she's finally here.

“It's a beautiful story,” she would say. “It's one of the very best.”

“It is,” I'd reply. "It is." . And then I'd quench the candle and we'd hunker down and the winter night would do its thing and there was not a trace of bitter almonds anywhere, just the stench of unwashed bodies and the fading scent of melted wax.

Part 1On his first day back, Grayson turned in to work two hours late. We'd crashed out with the back doors open and had woken up stone cold, and Grayson's veins had all retreated into the warmth and safety of his body. The bathroom looked like a slaughterhouse by the time we had finished. We rushed out, dressing as we strode down the road, Grayson calling in to say his alarm had frozen and me phoning any dealers to see if we could get an early score. It would be the mold for the next fortnight: falling even further behind what we were chasing and rarely having the time to wash our faces before we had to leave. That was when we started waking in our sunglasses, rarely doing too well first thing, cleaning out crack pipes and cooking up filters just to get us out the door. Grayson's savings were also running low and where I was back using every day, I had missed numerous deadlines for the little paid writing I had going on and had sent in other texts that were rejected out-of-hand due to not making any kind of sense. In our rush to make each day work, we were forgetting some things and abandoning others. And then there was Serena. Her latest move had been to turn up at Grayson's work and cause a huge domestic in front of his bosses. Ejected out the Arts Centre, she was now threatening to turn up at Grayson's flat, which would mean coming face-to-face with me.

Grayson's work disciplinary meeting neared ever closer. If ever he was concerned, it never showed. I had asked him to let me take control of it, warning that his work Union would not be able to defend him in the correct way. He agreed with everything I said, acknowledged the strategies I laid out and said that was what we would do. But once the crack had worn off, he just didn't seem to have the energy or volition to get the papers or contract I needed, nor record his conversations with his bosses, nor back-up his work emails. He just let his case fall more and more towards the Union and fully believed that they would work in his best interests. The dilemma was that doing things my way would have involved a lot of effort, and Grayson just didn't have the effort to do anything but get back home to the waiting drugs.

In the brief calm that preceded the actual hearing, Grayson would often return home in a positive mood, singing his bosses' praises and saying how kind and understanding they were being.

"You do know they're only being nice because they're gonna have to sack you?"

"Stop being so fucking pessimistic! I've a good feeling about this disciplinary... A very good feeling. It's not just my managers... Everyone's being so supportive. They just want to see me get back to my old self."

"They're going to fire you, mate. Mark my fucking words. They're being nice because they know come next week, you'll no longer be their problem. You've been late just about every day since you returned, had another unauthorised absence last week. You're taking two-hour long lunch breaks so as you can get home and get topped up and get back. You're smoking crack and shooting heroin in their toilets and having domestics in the public foyer! They're protecting their own asses so as you can't go for a constructive dismissal or put in a harassment or bullying complaint. They must tread very carefully due to your mental health status. It's why it would be so easy for us to fuck them. But their decision is already made. What you need to do is spend the next few days gathering up everything from your work: contracts, handbooks, copies of warnings and emails, the minutes from your previous disciplinaries... Everything. Also, the names of other colleagues who have previously been disciplined for unauthorized absence. If we can find a precedent that has already been set, we can fuck them on a discrimination charge once they sack you. But you need to get these things before you're fired – after, it'll be too late. They'll lock down all access to your records and kill your mail address.”

Tomorrow came and went, and Grayson didn't move a muscle to help protect himself. Instead, he left it with the Union rep, who he said would die fighting his corner.

The problem was that Grayson needed someone who was prepared to lie and cheat and pervert the cause of justice for him. Someone who'd willingly falsify records, create fake evidence, whip up the support of his colleagues, break the law and risk jail time. He needed someone who would advise him in what to do and say, regardless of the truth or the law, or who was right and who was wrong. He needed someone who detested the conservative art market, someone who had a grudge against business and management... Someone sadistic enough who would relish taking on the creeps who run such places. A Union rep is not that kind of a person. They generally support the truth and justice, and this just couldn't be about that. If it were then Grayson would be fucked, as he was as guilty as hell. If he'd have listened to me I would have either saved his job, or, even better, made sure he got fired and then put the company in a position where they'd have had to pay compensation in an out-of-court settlement. But it was too late for any of that. Grayson's fate was in the hands of a good-meaning but truthful union rep, and that just about guaranteed his fate would be a rotten one.

During that week, the good ship really started to take water. On the Monday, Grayson mentioned something about hoping his bank card would work. On Tuesday, he could only withdraw £100. And, on Wednesday, he left without his wallet and so I had to tap my mother for £200 which I promised would be paid back the next day.

The next day was the day of Grayson's hearing. I walked him to work. We were almost an hour late and we both looked like shit. I was wrapped up in a heap of scarves, shades tight over my eyes and limping from an injection I had missed in my ankle. Grayson was soaked through with a drug sweat, his suit was crumpled and stained, and his white shirt was black around the collar. Every few minutes he had to stop as he needed to vomit. He had already tried to withdraw cash at the ATM machine but it had rejected his card. The plan then was that he'd use his credit card to draw out ￡400 from the ticket office cash register at his work. With the 400 I'd repay my mother, score 200 worth of crack and heroin, and be back at his work with the drugs for the outcome of his hearing. On reaching his work, Grayson rushed on in while I lit a cigarette and waited outside. When he returned he could hardly speak. He was soaked through with perspiration and there was dry, crusted vomit on his lips.

“You sure your card's cancelled? It's not just because you've no money?”

“I don't know! All I know is it didn't work! The fucking bank's done us! I have to contact them. It says I have to contact them!”

“But there's money in the cash register? If you had a card it would work?”

“Yea, it'll work. Why? Do you have a card?”

“No. I don't even have a bank account. Not responsible enough, apparently.”

“Then what's your point?”

“Just take the money from the register. You'll be paid either tomorrow or Monday and you can pay it back then. How often do they count the tills?”

“Every day. I'm the cunt who counts them.”

“Well, count them wrong! We can make good the discrepancy later.”

“If I'm here later. Don't forget: my hearing.”

“Your disciplinary. Shit!”

“What should I do? Should I just take the lot? We could bunk off with everything... At least 4K. Have one last major blow out?”

“No! Do NOT take the lot! The police would be onto us before we've even blown out the first pipe. Take ￡400... It's all we need. 400 isn't so bad.”

Grayson lifted his glasses and stared at me. It was his way of saying we were losing our souls. God, he looked awful. I lifted my own shades, and staring deep into his eyes, I said: “Just fucking do it.”

Grayson took a huge intake of breath, knocked his shades back over his eyes, straightened himself up, then strode forward back into his work. He returned just a few minutes later, neurotic with nerves. He came right up to me, closing out the light, and with the security guards pacing about in the foyer, he started taking notes out his pocket and forcing them into my hands like he couldn't offload them quick enough.

“Take it, quick... Just take it and get the fuck outta here. There's ￡600... and a little more.”

Stood outside like that, too close to each other to be doing anything innocent, we stuffed and pushed the notes into my bag. “I've gotta go,” Grayson said. “The Union rep is waiting for me... Wants to go over a few things before the hearing. Try and get back ASAP... I feel like total crap.”

“I will do,” I said. “An' good luck... Fingers crossed they fire ya!” And with that, I left and made my way to the Underground to get a ticket and travel across town, repay my mother and score.

- - -

Exiting the tube station at the end of my outbound journey a text buzzed through on my phone. It was Grayson.

evrything alright? u got us sorted yet??

I'll have it in 15. Just walking to pick it up now. What time's your hearing?

Bin n passd. Bastards fired me. Bang Bang!!!

Shit.

can I come 2 meet u? need a pipe.

Go home and wait. I wont b long. R u OK?

I will b

yeah you will. I'll cya soon.

When I got back to Grayson's, he had been drinking. And not only that, immediately after being fired he had phoned Serena, and she had jumped at the chance to travel down and console him.

“She asked if she can come around for an evening... Cook me up something to eat and talk. I said yes. She's been so good and she at least deserves that.”

“When?” I asked.

“Tomorrow .”

“I'll ship out then. Give you two some time alone. What about gear? We'll need to score. How we gonna work that.”

“Fuck. She'll be around at 7.30 PM. You could head on down and score, and by the time you return I'll have gotten rid of her. It'll work out perfectly."

“Turned out he was a piece of shit. Hardly said two words, and what he did say only dropped me further in it.”

“You should have let me take that on. We could have had them by the bollocks.”

“It's over, mate... It's all over. The Southbank Centre is history.”

- - -

On the morning following Grayson's dismissal, I woke up to a queer sensation of sea-sickness. Grayson was in the room, wearing just his red shades and a pair of lipstick-printed boxer shorts. He was spidering around, filling bin bags with rubbish and collecting together the dirty dishes and cups and glasses of the past few weeks. The back doors were slung wide open. The buildings opposite seemed out of kilter, like they had been built on an incline. Way out over them, in the farthest distance, sat an ominous-looking band of dark rolled cloud.

“Serena,” Grayson said. I nodded. He gave a pained smile. “Just tidying up a little. If she sees the place in this state, she may refuse to leave."

I lit a cigarette. “Do you need any help?” I asked.​

“No, there's not so much to do. Just cap and bin your needles when you're up and get rid of any old crack pipes.” I closed my eyes and smoked my cigarette, and as I did, I listened to Grayson as he cleared the room and freed it from its recent memory.

“What you gonna do about the money from work?”

“Fuck 'em. Anyone could have taken that money. How they gonna prove anything against me?”

“Nah, we were too close together. We could have been doing anything. And, if it did all come on top I'd just say I lost it after being sacked and wanted to take revenge. I'll feign a breakdown. Stand there and piss my pants if I have to... Give them the money back trembling and sobbing.”​

“Still, if in the meanwhile there are any knocks on the door, hold your breath and don't answer.”

The day drifted by slowly. Out back, the spring grass was being harassed by a strong wind and as the light began to fall it looked like ruffled black seaweed. Then the smell of the river came in and rested over it, and as the shadows gradually filled in every last bit of space we sat in the quiet still of the room, and we kept to our own thoughts, and a great silent but malevolent melancholy slowly descended upon us. At just gone 7, I gathered up my phone and the cash, ready to head off across town.

“How long will you be?” asked Grayson.​

“The usual. An hour and a half... 2 hours.”​

“OK. I'll make sure she's well gone by then.”

- - -

When I arrived back around Grayson's area, it was gone ten. The night was in proper. I called Grayson to check if it was clear for me to head on back.

“Ten minutes,” he said. “You get sorted OK?"​

“Of course.”

“Thank fuck... I'm half sick here.”

Twenty minutes later, having received no news, I phoned Grayson once again.

“It's cool. You can come back,” he said.

“Has she gone?”

“Yeah, it's cool. See you soon.”

I walked the small walk back to Grayson's and let myself in. In the hallway, I was accosted by the heavy fumes of a potent form of weed - the kind of weed that grounds people in the same place for days. It trailed away down towards the living room, into the distinct silence of a room waiting to greet someone. Grayson came out in the hallway to meet me.

“Serena's here,” he mouthed. “She wants to meet you.”

I knew it. I knew it from the phone call but had given him the benefit of the doubt. I made to do a U-turn and leave. Grayson tugged me back and whispered, “Please, mate. She said she wouldn't leave until she had seen you. She'd have waited all night if I hadn't told you to come back. And I need some brown. Please. She'll only stay ten minutes." I pushed him aside and entered the living room.

“Hello Serena," I said, offering my hand. She stared at it like it was the hand of the devil wanting to waltz her around hell. After a moment, I withdrew it.

“So, we meet at last,” she said, taking the last drag of a joint. Then, very deliberately she scrunched the roach out in the ashtray. I watched her index finger, the unvarnished nail bitten down, twist it out like she was screwing out the body of a bug. I cast my eyes at her. She was looking at me. She was tall and thin but was one of those women who hunched into themselves like some kind of mad, gnawing rodent. She had a long, thin nose and there were dark brown depression rings beneath her eyes. She looked worse than us.

“So Shane,” she began, emphasizing my name in a condescending way, “Grayson tells me that you're this great writer?”

“Just as many think I'm the worst. Depends what you like or what you're after.”

“Hmm. Indeed. Well, I've had a good look over this writing of yours and I don't think much of it at all. It's vacuous, narcissistic crap... Nothing there at all.”

“As I say, not everyone can like it. If everyone likes it then you're doing something very wrong.”

She let out a cackle. “Doing something wrong? You really do think you're something, don't you?”

“That's not for me to say. What I think has no value at all. It's not how it works.”

She sat nodding and smiling, shaking her head in disbelief. “Cigarette,” she said. “Give me a cigarette.”

I took out my packet, opened the top, and held it out for her to take one.

“You're a bit fucking generous with Grayson's cigarettes!” she said. “Grayson, are these your cigarettes Shane is offering out? You're not fucking keeping him in smokes as well, are you!?” Then, back to me: “Don't you think that taking him for your scummy drug money is enough? How much a day? £300? You're smoking and shooting up £300 of my family's money every evening? Have you no scruples?”

“Blame me If you need to. I'll carry it. But Grayson is 42 years old, and he contacted me, and he wanted heroin, and my job isn't to question or try to stop him. Whatever life he had led him to me. A happy man would never have reached out.”

“I don't need your fucking sorrow! You should have maybe thought about that before taking money out of my child's mouth! You realize that's what you've done? Turned a little girl's father into a fucking junkie and coerced him into spending the money which would have helped to feed and clothe her?!”

Grayson, who had been standing in silence over near the door, now spoke. Of all the things, he said:

“Give us the gear, mate... I need some brown.”

I went in my bag, took out the tissue I had the drugs wrapped in and gave it to him. Serena bowed forward with her head in her hands, rocking as Grayson took the drugs and made his way out the room to straighten himself up. Once he was gone Serena rose and left the room too. I stood staring down at her handbag, a packet of thin menthol cigarettes sat right at the top.

It was a weird night. The grass out back was still being splayed by the wind. It felt like there was something out there, some force hanging in the dark city air that weaved through lifetimes. From out the bedroom I could hear Serena and Grayson screaming at each other, another domestic ringtone sounding out across town.

Grayson returned alone. “Sorry mate,” he said. “She's leaving now.” He collected her handbag and took it out. I followed him. Serena was standing in the hallway. Under the dull lighting, the dark under her eyes was even more pronounced. She stood staring at me until tears slowly overspilled the bottom lids of her eyes. I wanted to hold her, somehow grip her into me, let her fight and scream and kick and spit and then give in and sink into the darkness of comfort that another body offers. I didn't move. She wiped her eyes and she took one of Grayson's hands and she said, “Fucking sort it out! Sort it out!"

When Grayson next joined me in the room he had been crying himself.

“That was hard, putting her out like that,“ he said. “That was too fucking hard.” He fell down onto the sofa, in the exact same spot where Serena had been sitting. He stared at the floor and outside the black sea grass blew and I knew - it was all coming to an end.

The early hours of that night were imbued with a great sadness. Grayson was reflective and knew his life had collapsed around him. He was out of a job, almost out of cash, and the only thing in the world that still loved him unconditionally and could help had just left in tears and was probably vomiting up her disgust into the river. We smoked our crack in silence, and when it was gone Grayson asked if I could hit him up with a fix of heroin. As I probed around his forearm in the bathroom, I could feel him staring at me. I had a hard time finding anything in his arm and there were lumps and marks bearing up on both sides. He didn't wince nor make a single complaint, just stared at me until he felt the drug reach his brain. I tossed the syringe in the sink and left him there, slowly going over, folding into himself as his last place of retreat.

The next day it was the the official first day of summer. The money we had stolen from Grayson's work was all gone. At 10 AM we were down outside the bank, waiting for it to open. Grayson withdrew the money from his final paycheck along with the small overdraft he was allowed. It would kept us going for another few days, but no more. During those days, as the tide that had pulled Grayson out slowly washed him back ashore, we made the first moves to enrol him in a methadone program. It would take a week, but he was taken on and given the date his first script would be scribbled out. To bide him through, we travelled back and forth across town buying up as much methadone and useful opiates as we could. The next days would be tough. I told Grayson that I'd stay there with him and we'd suffer the worst if it out together.

And, with the money gone and having slipped into overdraft we could do nothing but drag a hand down our heavy faces, take a deep breath, swallow, exhale and prepare ourselves for a period of sober living. So, in a flat in Lambeth, as the first hot, carnival days of summer rolled in, we slept and watched films and sweated it out on a diet of methadone, paracetamol and slow-release morphine tablets. And, after four days in surrender we came to and found our feet, and for a moment, in the ageing middle of our lives, the bastard sea of life sat still.

It was one of those tawdry summer evenings and all I could think about was the heat. It was everywhere, stuffy and humid and crucifying even at that late hour. Then there was a woman, looking older than she was, sat outside the closed Estate Agent's, pickled drunk and burnt out as if she’d lived in that oven since forever. And with the heat, on top of the drink, she was in an uncommon daze, like the madness in her mind was cooked in for good. She was scrunching up her face and moaning, pushing away the arm of a man who was trying to tell her something, trying to get through, pull her up and take her off someplace.

“Fuck off an’ away, Bobby!” she kept saying. “Just leave me alone.”

Every now and again her eyes would lull back in her head like she was about to go out. Then, just as slowly, they would recentre and refocus and she would return once more to the hell of her immediate reality. O, the heat was cooking everyone up and the city was all set to catch aflame. That was the summer of my return to London, when for a brief moment something felt like it could really happen.

“O, fank yew Bruvva, fank yew... Yew'v saved me. Me sed tuh muhself, lookin'on down at yuh while me was over d'ere... Me sed: Now dat's a decent kinda felluh right along d'ere. I knew it! Me could sense duh goodniss in yuh. Man, I can't tell yuh what me'd do fuh a rock uh white... Two beers an' uh rock uh white, an' that'll be me juss fine tuhnight. Man, you be belongin' round'ere? Ain't never sin yuh before, is all. Me aRlways good fer uh face, but uh name... O, yuh can forget dat! Me can't even remember duh names uh me own childrin. How wicked is dat, Bruvva? Me own spawned brethrin, an' I doan even know duh names nor how old dey even be. Grown up now, uh bet. Grown right on up an' out hustlin' juss like I was at dat age. O, man... Summer wasn't like dis back d'hen. Yuh cud breathe when we were young. Now the world has juss gottin heavy... Weighs right down on uh man like uh sack uh cement. An' round'ere too, I mean. O, duh Bush wuz uh place tuh be back den... An' den dis happened: We grew up an' once we had an' we opened our eyes, uh whole generation had lost itself... lost sumting. We din't come in from afar, Bruvva... We wuz aRlways 'ere, only yuh'd never 'ave noticed us before.”

I stared at the man, this black ragtime prophet. And as I stared, his yapping went mute, and for some moments I watched the silent animation of his mouth as it twisted and contorted into horrendous shapes, his words being formed in that masticating orifice, pushed out on the tip of an indecent purpled tongue.

“Bobby FUCK OFF!!! I'm stayin' 'ere. Fuck off, an' away Bobby!”​

“We've gotta move on, Doll. We can't stay here. I can't leave you here like this... You'll have us both fucking collared."​

I turned to confront this latest spectre on the scene. He stood before me thin but broad, his arms out and hung at the elbows like he'd been pegged out on a line to dry. His face was pale and not quite white, and his eyes were large and mad.​

“Didya hear me? Said the cunt's given me the right ol' runaround today. Please mate, just give him a bell an' tell him Dave is 'ere.”​

“I'm not waiting for Jamie. I don't know any Jamies.”​

“Who you after, then? Silver? The Somalians?”​

“Could be.”​

Nah, mate... Don't score offa that lot. Them are fucking robbin' Somalian cunts. Won't see them unless no one else is on... An' I mean NO ONE. Buy offa my man, Jamie. Come on. Whatd'ya want? Jamie's are twice the size. Here, give us ya dosh and we'll see him together... Right now.”​

“Get outta here. I'm not giving you my money!”​

“What, ya don't trust me? Ya think just because I'm a junkie I'm a thieving cunt? Is that it? I don't need to be fucking slyin’ people, mate. Am doing just fine as it is.”​

“I can see that. Now, leave me alone. This place is hot enough as it is.”​

“Mate, will ya just phone him, for fucksake? Just a quick call?"​

Before I could answer, he had given up on me and was scampering off, wraithlike, up the road, stopping people and terrifying them, rattling his jangling neurosis along his stricken path.

There it was again: that voice and those words, the sound of a cracked and corrupted lullaby. It was a bawl that carried on through generations and told the tale of every such summer evening there ever has been. I watched the woman once more, and wondered what the hell we were all doing.

The road was busy now. The fast food shops had started serving in earnest and a few more drinkers had congregated on the corners. The men in the late-night gambling shop came out for cigarettes and in moments you could hear the greyhound races being called and the hullabaloo as another favourite lost its legs around the penultimate bend. That was another man's hope gone right there. I watched the man who then stood outside the Bookies. He smoked his smoke and pondered, and it looked like he had finally found the answers to his problems in those long, drawn-out drags he took of his tobacco. It's a well-known fact: The gamblers like the drunks and the drunks like the gamblers, but no one likes the junkies.​

The man cast his eyes my way. He took the last inch of smoke from his cigarette and, still staring at me, flicked the smouldering butt into the gutter as if that place held some importance for me. I wanted to say something to him, stare him straight down the barrel and tell him something crazy. But I said nothing. I kept my silence and let him return in peace to the safety of his losing hub to flagellate himself in that way.​

“Aye aye,” a voice said.​

I turned around to see two community police specials trotting themselves into the scene. One was tall and sticking up as straight as a pencil, and the other was shorter and well-built with a bright red face that looked like he was being strangled. They both wore their half-sleeved summer uniforms. Their radios crackled and chirruped away like insects in the warm, late evening. They approached the drunk woman sat outside the Estate Agent's. Slowly she raised her drink-laden face and squinted them into view.​

“What you want? I ain't done nothing wrong. I've had a drink is all but I din't do nothing to no one.”​

“Madam, we've reason to believe you was in Hammersmith this afternoon, and we need to ask you a few questions about what you did there.”​

“Hammersmith? Questions? I din't fucking do anything!”​

“Madam, let's do this somewhere a little more private. I'm sure you don't want your private business spilled out onto the street?”​

The two police specials helped her up. When they let go she stood swaying, tottering like that until her body decided on the vertical. Then she looked around.​

“Bobby! Bobby!!!” she called. But Bobby was gone, just a hunched back walking briskly away and turning off down the first street he arrived at. The police escorted the lady a little ways down the adjoining residential street. They lowered her to a sitting position against a garden wall and stood over her, looking in and wondering what to do.

The heat was getting to everyone. The workers in the furnace of the Kebab house were standing outside, fanning themselves down with damp cloths. The drunks at the bus stop sat bemused and dehydrated. And the junkies waited and some sweated because of the heat, and others because of their poison. That's when the wraithlike addict returned, screaming on about Jamie again.​

“Reel it in a bit, mate. The police are down there.,” I said.​

He looked down the street at the police with the drunk woman. He waved them off.​

“They're not fucking police... Just community workers! They've got fuck-all powers of arrest and wouldn't dare bust us. They can't, mate.... Not allowed. Imagine one of them daft cunts busting a dealer for a few bags and fucking up a 6-month long surveillance op? Them cunts are used to sweep the drunks along, kick the beggars' teeth out and jump in to break up bottle fights. One got himself killed the other month and it wasn't even in the paper! Even their own lot don't like ‘em. Fuck ‘em.”​

At that he stood astride, right on the corner, facing the police officers, and screamed “Waaaankers!” while gesticulating the act with his hand.​

“Fucking waaankers. Leave her alone. She's innocent!”​

The tall wooden officer warned him to stay back.​

“Yeah, an' what you gonna do if I don't?”​

“Just stay where you are, Sir; I'm asking you for the last time!"​

“Stick your final warning up your arse! I wouldn't wanna be any closer. And I'll tell you what: If I was doing a little better I'd have your fucking badge! Harassing bastards and no one does a thing about it.”​

For a moment there was a brief stand-off. Then the officer turned, and the wraithlike addict cursed, and the evening went on and the heat was just as persistent as ever.

The commotion he introduced to the road preceded him. The sudden screeching of braking cars, the bleating of horns and the shouts of irate drivers. He wheeled himself on like it was nothing, and I knew he was heading my way.​

He had no legs and he said he was a poet. He parked up a small meter opposite me and sat sweating away in his cheap government-issue wheelchair. He had oily grey hair pulled back into a straggly ponytail and a wooden beaded necklace hung down around his bare, bony, sun-scorched chest. Beads of perspiration rolled down over his abdomen and soaked into the top band of his trousers.​

"D'you like poetry?" he asked.​

"No," I said. "I hate everything to do with reading and writing... Bores the shit outta me."​

"Well, you're missing out there, then. Good poetry is better than any drug you can get... Better than this shit we're pumping into ourselves. When great poetry hits it fucking transports you to another dimension, man. Serious, you don't know what you're missing."​

"And what am I missing? And, more importantly: You... Are you any good?"​

"Good? Me? I'm the poet... THE Poet! I've invented a whole new expression, a new type of poetry altogether! Everyone knows me. Used to sit outside the Broadway and write my verse on the fucking pavement in different coloured chalks. You must've seen me? If you live around here you'd have seen me?"​

"What's your name?"​

"Already told you: The Poet."​

"O, I didn't realize that was your actual name. You up for reciting a line or two?”​

“Of course. Always on the lookout for an eager audience.”​

He reached down inside the crutch of his trousers and withdrew a damp, rotting notepad. He began leafing through it like it were his life savings, pulling faces as he looked over his work, like that one wasn't quite right and the next wasn't him at his best, etc. When he had settled on one he was happy with, he kinda wriggled up straight in his chair, cleared his chest, before gobbing out a huge grey hunk of phlegm down on the pavement to the side of his wheelchair.​

“Hhh Hmmmm.... This one's called, er, ‘My Monkey’.”​

“And is ‘My Monkey’ rhymed up with the word ‘junkie’?” I asked.​

“You best believe it is. Seven fucking times, if you want numbers!"​

“Then I've heard it. You're right, you are known.”​

“Yeah? You've really heard that one?”​

“I have. And more than once.”​

“Huh! Then how about my much revered, anti-festive ditty – ‘Cold Christmas Turkey’?”​

“About withdrawals, isn't it? Being junk-tied over Christmas?”​

“It is! See, you know more about contemporary verse than you think.”​

“Look over there,” I said. “Do you see that green telephone connection box?”​

The de-legged junkie poet looked over to where I was pointing and nodded.

“Well,” I said, “I know what's behind it... the years' worth of dust and smog and grime which has settled there. I know the piss and the dampness and the weeds at the bottom and the fat brown slugs which slither out by night. I know the scrunched-up cigarette packets, the pigeon's shit, the rusting empty beer cans and the 'Black Nurse with a Cock' Call-Guy flyer stuck upon the side. That's what I know about contemporary verse, right there.”​

"Well, that's nice... Very nice. But that's not poetry. It's what us fellas in the writing game refer to as 'prose'."​

"But I never said I was a poet. You said that. You said you were a poet... The Poet."​

He looked at me like Doubting Thomas would have looked at Jesus. Then he took a huge lungful of air and, with his chest inflated, began booming out verse in a majestic voice:

And like Abas a mocker be

O pig, O boar, O trundling swine

I name you as a Philistine!

I couldn't help but burst out into laughter, almost sucking my lit cigarette down my gorge before finally spitting it out in a spluttering guffaw. At that, the legless poet started pointing and booming:​

“Philistine!!! Hey O, I name it a Philistine! Philistine! Philistine for all to see!!!”​

People in the street turned to stare, saw a wheelchair-bound amputee gesturing and screaming out poetry and insults, and waved him off as some kind of nut. When he had finished, his hands gripped ahold of each wheel of his chair and he slowly set himself in motion. He wheeled himself right up to me. I thought he was going to spit at me or ride his stump of a leg into my knee. He did neither. Rather, he parked his chair an inch from my toes and said quietly: "Why are people like you such fucking Philistines?"​

"Because it's easier and more fruitful than being a poet... Much more a bad one," I said.​

At that, he took up his soiled notebook of verse and for a moment looked like he was going to rip it in two. He didn't. He held it aloft and he shook it like it were a Bible. Then he screamed: “These are mine! These are all fucking mine!!!” before shoving his life's work back down into the humid fermenting underworld of his pants. He chugged himself into motion once more and headed off down towards the gambling shop. He made it clear that he'd prefer to wait out the wait next to a gambler who despised him, rather than linger anywhere near me. As the Amputee Poet pulled up, the Smoking Gambler slid his eyes discreetly down upon him, then moved a large foot aside. Every now then, as we continued our wait, the amputee would look over at me, all the while muttering and shaking his head in disbelief at one man's total ignorance.

There were now at least six heroin addicts waiting to score. Two were sat across the road drinking a coffee outside the cheap Chinese café, another one was down at the bus stop, I was right on the corner, the amputee was outside the gambling shop and the young wraithlike addict was still approaching and harassing anyone who came down the road.​

"Told ya I din't do anything. I like a drink is all but I ain't no thief. Do I look like I could get out a shop with anything? Most shops won’t even let me in! Nah, like I said, I ain't sin Bobby! Not for over a week. I thought you was Bobby... That's why I was calling him. Thought it was him kicking me awake again."​

"Well, if you do see Bobby, you need to tell him to come in and see us. He's breached his licence and it'll be better he hands himself in than he gets picked up kin the street – like that he'll almost certainly be going back to prison."

"Nah, I won't be seeing Bobby. I told ya: ain't seen him for over a month now... Not since he clumped me one and knocked two of me bottom teeth out. Will have nothing to do with him after that."​

The two police specials stood and listened to the woman's contradictions. They pondered over her even after she had stopped talking. Doll plonked her beer can down on the step of the Estate Agent's and then fell down to a sit with about the same force. The smaller policeman tapped his colleague. “Come on; let's go.” The tall police special nodded a knowing nod and pulled a resigned face – there was nothing they could do. He looked around and then looked down towards the wraithlike addict, who was still going from person to person. “Yeah, let's go,” he said. Whether he saw the tragedy that I saw, or just a people who had slipped into a state of daily lawlessness that legislature couldn't deal with was unsure. Whatever his thoughts, he kept them to themselves and the two police specials walked away with no arrest. Barely were they out of sight when Bobby returned.​

"Doll, did they ask about, me? You didn't tell ‘em nothing, did ya? Doll... Doll...." But for the moment Doll was gone, taken by slumber and left to cook, helpless in the throbbing murder of the evening sun.​

- - -

It was gone 9 pm when the amputee poet suddenly spun his wheelchair around and made off down the road at full speed, his arms going like the main rod on an old train wheel. The two addicts who had been at the Chinese café were also on the move, beelining across the street, both in faded black and wearing dark shades, one holding his jacket over his shoulder. And they weren't the only ones. Another came from the bus stop, and yet another cycled past wearing no top and self-inked tattoos up his arms and over his torso. I headed up the tail-end, purposely keeping a distance in case some bitter gambler had rung in a call to the police.​

"Man, wait up... Wait fuh me, Bruvva. Dontcha be goin' an dispeerin' on me now.” It was Ol' Yankee, trying to keep apace with me in case I scored and took the back street doubles home. I could smell his body odour, the very particular odour of an old black man whose last wash was months before mine.​

“Qwik, Bruvva... Hurry it up. Thuh fool uh 'ave no food leff if all d'hese vultures get tuh him first. Doan worry 'bout me. I be d'ere or d'ereabouts... You go'oRn up ahead.”​

I ignored Yankee's pleas for me to hurry up and lingered quite away behind the main body of users hobbling and wheeling and cycling up to score. The only addict who was not chasing up the dealer was the wraithlike kid who was waiting on a different crew.​

“If you need something, you better get it while it's here,” I said to him.​

“D’ya think he'd do me credit? I'm good for it. One thing I always do is pay my debts off.”​

“I doubt it. Depends on how well you know them and what business you bring.”​

“Mate, please, phone Jamie for me. Ask him where he's at.”​

“Cathnor Park, Jamie?”​

“Yeah, that's the cunt.”​

“What's your name again?”​

“Dave. Crazy Dave. He'll know who you're talking about.”​

Just as I went to call Jamie, my phone went. It was my dealer.​

“I've seen ya, Bro.... Don't come up this way. Go back and wait down near the cafe. I'll be five minutes.”​

As I made my way slowly back from where I had come, I phoned Jamie. There was no answer and that wasn't good news.​

“Dave, he's not answering, mate.” Dave lent far back and with his mouth to the sky he screamed, “Cuuuuunt. Cuuuuuunttt!!!” And for a moment his despair echoed throughout the area, like a wild dog that was grieving and howling out to unknown forces in the night.​

The sun had almost set by the time the Somalian came down with my order. The heat had lessened a notch but the night was still muggy and humid and the city's shadows were stretched large and dark and were sinister and cool. The old Chinese owner of the cafe was out sweeping his shop front for the last time that night.

"Coffee? Tea?? Best coffee in Bush jus' one pound, one cup?” he said.​

“Not tonight,” I replied.​

“Warm warm night,” he said , looking on up to the darkness that was coming in.​

“It's been a hot one,” I agreed.​

“Yes, very hot. My God, where this heat come from? That's what I wanna know?”​

"Yankee," I said, discreetly pushing a small bag of crack into his hand, “where does the heat come from?”​

Yankee tightened his fist around the rock of crack and the old Chinese café owner stopped sweeping. He stood and he leant on his broom, and he looked out with longing into the deep dark mauve of the sky. And I was looking too, and so was Yankee, way out into the wherever, to somewhere far from here, to a place we could never return.
- - -

Spring had come to London. From out the death and rot of winter came forth the fragile green beginnings of life, and from the tips of the hard, seemingly extinct branches of the city's trees appeared the first ugly knots of beautiful growth. I was down to the lunula of my fingernails, had been steadily eating myself away in an effort to survive and not bury myself in debt. I had buried myself in debt. Among the few people who cared I had relinquished my pride and accepted their generosity, had used it to paper over the ever-widening cracks of other, more pressing debts. But then, Came the Spring Came Hope. It showed in the broken plastic chairs that reappeared outside the cheap Chinese cafe, came with the far-off squinting sun and the blue and wet of fresh days. I didn't dream often just then, but when I did I dreamt of love and tenderness and loyalty; of light summer dresses and romance, of a square of room, any room, where we could retreat, lie together and talk out words into the night. And that was how it was in that year, when spring came to London, during my first spring back in town.

A message emerged from out of that blue. It flashed through on my phone early one morning and sat there for three hours waiting for me to find it. I read the words and then I read them again. It didn't help. They made even less sense second time around. All that I could determine with any degree of certainty was that his name was Grayson and he was in some kind of trouble.

Must be wriggling some bait to put the bite on me, I thought. Strangers were always doing that, imagining that I was doing well and would leap out of bed at the chance to wire them across some money. As I was deliberating over what to do, a second message buzzed through.

Soz 2 msg like this. not doin 2 good. Plz msg back.

So it is money, I thought. It's rarely anything else.

What'$ the problem? I sent back.

Grayson's response was immediate, this time emotionally cryptic and worrying:

im just so angry m8. U no like so fuckin angry n i dont have any1 2 turn 2. feels like sumthing real bad is gonna happen.

I understood that whoever this Grayson fella was, that he was certainly struggling to keep ahold of any beauty in life, was maybe floundering in the junk tank or was possibly even quite seriously ill. I quit messaging and called. He didn't answer. Then he messaged.

cant blieve u foned. fucka! was 2 spineless 2 answer. call again.

I did call. And from that call Grayson would be drawn out and pinned wide open, the old junk train would chug, loaded back into the station and, for another year, spring would be abandoned and the trees would bloom alone.

I turned up to meet Grayson with a large kitchen knife stuffed down the band of my trousers. Too many psychos out there to rely on luck and intellectual reflexes. If he tried to pull any crazy shit on me, I'd vowed to pin his guts to the inside of his back. Over the years my words had secured quite a number of death threats. One guy, whose daughter had died from an overdose, had journeyed over to France to track me down and even up the score. In his penultimate email he wrote, 'People like you are a cancer on society.’ His mail included a picture of the apartment I had abandoned just a month previous and a warning that he'd find my new address within days. He never did, and I never heard from him again. And now, there I was, waiting to meet a stranger who had been saying some real weird stuff that made no real sense apart from "I'm just real fucking angry." It was that logical, almost placid acknowledgment that he was finding it difficult to cope which unnerved me. So, I stood waiting for him with a knife digging into my groin, purposely positioned on the opposite side of the road and a little way down from where I had arranged to meet him. I wanted to give myself as much room to manoeuvre as possible, be in a position to observe and weigh Grayson up before deciding whether or not to go through with the meet.

It was a fine spring afternoon. The overground tube grabbed ahold of its track and lurched on over the iron railway bridge. It headed on down its line and left an echo of its entire history in the day. I could smell treated wood and boiled tarmac, dusty stones and the black engineering grease of faraway days. Surely this wasn't an afternoon that would be pierced through with psychotic melodrama. With the train then just a faint rumble in the distance, a man appeared outside the station. He wore red-framed shades and had wavy, greying hair which was finger-combed through with wet gel. His nose was very slightly upturned. He stood there holding a large bouquet of bright yellow daffodils. It was Grayson. I recognized him from the pictures I had seen online. I eyed him closely. He made a phone call. As he spoke he observed himself in a shop window, made an attempt to tidy himself up a little, like he cared what kind of an impression he would make. He didn't seem obviously troubled. I unfolded my own shades, placed them over my eyes, crossed the road and approached him from behind. “Grayson?” I said, gently touching his arm as I came around. For a moment he seemed taken aback, lost for words. Then he found himself. "Ya Fucka!" he said. I could smell alcohol off him. He was slightly taller than I and stood in front of me looking as awkward as I have ever seen any man look. Then he said: "Well, give us a hug then, ya Fucka!" He opened his arms and, being careful not to crush his daffodils, he embraced me and squeezed tight and he was full of warmth.

Grayson seemed no more prone to violence than most people with borderline psychotic tendencies. If anything, he seemed kind of sorrowful and lost, reflective, still speaking in half riddles.

"I just bought these shades,” he said. “You know, had to cover my eyes to commute... To stop people looking in at me.”

I didn't have a clue as to what the hell he was talking about. I nodded as if I did. That's when I noticed his shirt, yellow stains down the front and two large patches of perspiration spread out from under each armpit.

"Excuse the shirt, I didn't have anything clean."

"I've worn worse,” I said. “It's nothing. Right, shall we grab a coffee and talk? You can explain a little of what's been going on."

"A coffee? Er, we can, but I was thinking I could maybe shout you something a little stronger? I didn't want to ask over the phone. "

"Stronger? Like gear stronger? Can I score for ya?"

"Gear... Score… Yeah. Can you?"

"D'you even need to ask? How come, though? Is there some kind of blockage your end?”

“I wouldn't know, mate. I've not used for six years... Deleted all my numbers when I quit.”

“Six years?! Fuck. That's something. I've never even gone six weeks."

"I know. It's one of the things I admire about you. You seem to have accepted what you are. I wish I was more like that. I'm just fuckin' dishonest... An absolute fraud."

"Nothing to admire in me. I only burnt my bridges so as I could never sneak back across. Now, are you absolutely sure you want me to score? It's six years, don't forget."

"I'm sure. I'm more sure about that than just about anything else right now. Give your man a call and order like 300 quid's worth from him. What'll we get for that?”

"It's three for twenty... The white and brown. 300 would be 45 bits."

"Three for twenty? Fuck! Then order 200 in white and a 100 of brown... might as well make a proper day of it. Will it be cool to go back to yours?"

"It's right where we're headed,” I said. “Though I see you've already lost a yard of pace."

“I'll get it back, don't worry. I'm not all shot through just yet... And I won't slow you down."

- - -

Grayson looked uncomfortable sitting within the confines of a room. It was like the walls and ceiling were exerting an undue pressure on him. He was sweating, and his clothes appeared suddenly too tight. He sat there like that, on the edge of the sofa, counting out his money by dealing each note down onto the table in front of me. When he was done, he asked how long I'd be.

"Five minutes. You can come with me, if you like?"

"Nah, I trust ya, mate."

"You'll get badly stung trusting people round here. You may even get badly stung today!"

"I know the scene, don't worry. If I'm honest I'd expect nothing less. Worse, if it were me I'd probably fuck off with the cash myself. I've just about given up caring either way."

“O well, I guess we take our chances. Just don't steal the fucking windows while I'm gone.”

“Huh???”

“The windows. Don't steal 'em or jump through 'em! I'll see you in five.”

- - -

£300.

45 bags.

3 extra.

32 white.

16 brown.

A handful of holiday.

I unclenched my fist and let the bags fall out on the table in front of Grayson. He barely even acknowledged them. Instead, he took a small puff on the cigarette he was smoking and after blowing out a little chortle of smoke, he said:

"Help yaself, mate. Go ahead. This is my treat.”

"Not how it works, I'm afraid. First pipe's yours. You look like you need it much more than I do."

I set up a pipe for Grayson. It was a little homemade number, a small plastic methadone bottle run through with the stem of a biro and crowned with a skin of tin foil. It looked like it was just about ready to go out jousting. Grayson raised the pipe to his mouth. I lit it for him. Through the wavering flame, Grayson trembled. And then he sucked, and the flame swamped over the crack and ash and was taken down through the perforations in the foil and disappeared into the top of the bottle. Grayson inhaled. When he'd taken his fill, he raised a hand to signal for me to cut the flame. He rested motionless for a second, holding the sweet smoke in his lungs. Then he exhaled, sending ghosts of smoke tumbling and expanding out into the room. I watched him with a tenderness of soul, took a strange pleasure in observing the effect that the pipe had on him. As the drug hit his brain he made a deep, low groaning sound, like he was being relieved of a tremendous burden. It made me sad. And, for a moment, before my turn on the pipe, I sat in the silent, smoky spectre of a life that had fallen into an unnamed tragedy.

Alone like that, free from the distraction of the day turning on around us, it was the first proper look that I got of Grayson. Sat down and hunched over into himself, unwrapping a second rock of crack, he seemed much broader than he had appeared while standing outside the station. I also became aware of his facial stubble, at least a week's worth and a few years greyer than the hair on his head. Whether down to nerves or some kind of mental distraction, his eyes were fast and jittery. At times they lost focus and glassed over and seemed not to want to settle on anything in the past. Maybe the only constant was his sweating – an itchy uncomfortable perspiration of the type that rivers toxins out the body. I was still looking out for any sudden changes of mood or personality. There was nothing obvious, but there was something. Underneath, below the moist skin, it felt like his soul was wound like rope and knotted up. I let him drain his second pipe. As he tapped the dead ash clear from the bottle, I probed him for his story.

“So, what was the problem this morning? You said you were angry?”

“I did. I am. But fuck... How to explain it? Like, you've never felt angry? Pissed with the world? The present? The past? It's like I'm tied in place, caught in a web and the fucking spider is creeping slowly in to finish me off. I've got a job. Oh, I'm so fucking dishonest. They think I'm Mr Grayson... Clean and tidy and responsible. Always telling others how to get back on track and I'm so far off mine that I no longer know which track it is. Everything's like that. Like I'm a fraud to everyone. This is me. This is me right here! Getting fucked up and enjoying it! I've been made an outcast. I became someone I'm not... Became ashamed of who I was and proud of the man I wasn't! That's fucked up. Real fucked up. And that's my life. That was my life. Things change. I've been drinking. I knew I really wanted junk, but I drank instead. It's OK to be a drunk. Except in the shop where you buy your liquid. There they look at you like shit. Treat you like it. Think that you can't see them through the fog of alcohol! They begrudge having to take 89p for their cheapest can. They sell it at that price! They price them up! And you know what? If you buy their weakest beer at twice the price they treat you differently... Even if your fingers are just as brown and your nails just as dirty. As they say: there's levels. There's even levels to being a drunk. I never got off the first level. That's why I'm angry. I lost myself in trying to be sober. I seethe as I talk, feeling that dishonesty inflating within me with every word. That's why I admire you. You just are what you are and rather than hide it you unhide it. I need to do that, but I can't. Small town mentality? Maybe. There it's so different. You've gotta keep secrets if you want a friend round there. Pull this shit with the curtains open and you'll come round to a very lonely world... If indeed you come round at all. “

I listened but never replied. In parts it made a kind of sense. But there was something dark surrounding his words, something dangerous. Like he said: something seething.

I must have been staring at Grayson, as I next became aware of him looking at me looking at him.

"Give us a hug then, ya Fucka!" he said. He always said that, 'fucka', whenever he expressed anything soft. It was as if I were such a Fucka that him feeling the need for a hug was my fault. "You're brilliant, you are,” he said as we unclinched. “I hope ya fucking know that? Fucking admire what you do so much."

"I write... That's all. Nine-tenths of the time I don't even do that."

“Nah... that's not all you do. You don't understand. Right now, the world needs great artists and writers more than ever. I work at the Southbank Centre, ticket manager. The performers – O God! Not one of them has anything to say. Either they're all 'darkly comic' to make up for any real depth to their work, or they're so middle of the road that they get mistaken for the fucking lines! It’s one of the reasons I wanted to meet you... Talk to you... Make a business proposal to you. Shit, ya Fucka, you're making me lose my words. The thing is this: I'd like to be your manager.”

“My manager??? Fuck. Where did that come from?”

“Well, you need a manager, don't you? Or you will do. That's my thing, what I'm good at: organizing stuff, meeting deadlines, getting the drugs in... convincing people they need things they really don't! I sold a bald guy a crate of shampoo once... anti-dandruff shit as well!”

“That certainly makes you something... But a manager? My manager??? I mean, let’s just weigh this up, soberly:

We've only just met.

You're in a bit of a state, freshly wired after six years on the wagon.

You say you're suffering from anger management issues.

You've never managed an artist before.

And, maybe our biggest problem: ME... I've nothing to manage!

So, I really don't know what else to tell ya…. Of course you can be my fucking manager! Though there is one condition: No more shampoo to bald guys. We don't need that... Yet.”

And so, not even an hour in, Grayson had had something a little stronger than coffee, had fallen off the wagon and landed on the horse; I was stood opposite, sucking the entrails out of a dying pipe which I hadn't paid for. And, to cap everything off, I'd landed myself a manager. It was pretty decent going. Especially considering we'd only blasted down a couple of rocks apiece and the day had barely made it out of 2 o'clock.

Grayson stayed on late that night. By the time he eventually left, he was in much better spirits. Still not everything made sense, but enough made sense to know that he wasn't completely off the rails. I walked him back down to the tube station, said goodbye and listened to the tired chugging of the last westbound train as it clattered off like music into the night.

- - -

I didn't hear from Grayson for three days. Then his face appeared in my messenger. This time he got straight to the heart of things:

not doing 2 good. u up 4 a sesh?

Come on down. It'll b fine.

And so Grayson travelled down once more, scored another £300 of gear, divided it in half and opened up a little more. He told me more about his ticket manager job at the Southbank Arts Centre and how it had led to him being signed off with acute mental stress and depression. He also mentioned that he was due up on a disciplinary for an unauthorised absence. That wasn't too serious in itself, though it transpired that it was the last in a long line of offences and had happened only weeks into a final written warning. The Centre seemed hesitant to take a decision while he was signed off sick. I asked Grayson if he had suffered a mental breakdown, to which he reluctantly answered 'no' and then even more reluctantly answered 'yes'. Then, with no reluctance at all, he called me a Fucka.

Aside from his work, the night revealed another part of the Grayson puzzle: Serena. It wasn't the first time that the name had been uttered, only now he spoke of her freely and did so as if I knew her. Yet every time he mentioned her name, revealed a new anecdote of conjugal hell, he would suck down a fresh pipeload of crack as if to force her right out the back of his mind.

"I'll always fucking love her, in some context," he said. "Only now it isn't really love... not like it was. It's different. She's more someone I'd protect with my life and never want to hurt. But I do hurt her... I am hurting her."

"Are you still together?"

Grayson trembled an outheld hand in the air, as if that status was somehow still in the balance.

“Well, who left who? Who caused the rupture?” I asked.

“That was me.... Well, me by consequence of my behaviour. She said I either had to stop drinking or stop seeing her. I went for a walk to figure things out and returned home too drunk to talk. I told you, I'm a coward. I've not seen her since. But she's not in a good way. I'm worried she may hurt herself... I mean, seriously hurt herself."

After listening to some more details it was quite clear, at least to me, that this Serena defaulted to a position of self-harm and outlandish threats of suicide whenever she couldn't get her way with a lover. She seemed determined to get Grayson back by whatever means necessary. And like most people of that persuasion, the more desperate she became and the more frustrated she got, the more extreme her behaviour became until she finally lost all care and pride and would end hysterical, screaming down the phone with a knife to her own throat.

"And, does she know you're back using?"

Grayson nodded as he sucked hard on a pipe and inhaled. He carried on nodding until he could speak.

"She knows. I told her first day."

"Did you enjoy telling her?”

“I did, yes.”

“How'd she take that?"

"She collapsed to her knees screaming and pulling her hair and cursing God. She's Italian."

"Fuck, I must be popular with her!"

Grayson wagged a negating finger. "Uh, no... She thinks nothing of you. She knows about addiction... knows about me. This is my choice."

"Well, I'll take your word for it. But if I know people half as well as I think I do, especially people predisposed to emotional blackmail who believe in God and learnt how to mourn in Italy, she'll blame me all right, and what's more: she'll be hellbent on clearing me outta your life."

Grayson froze staring at me with his mouth slightly ajar. His eyes were watery with a certain kind of universal dread which came through understanding and disappointment. He knew I knew, that blame had already been portioned out and I was the devil-in-the-wilderness.

- - -

Grayson started scoring on a daily basis soon after that. It wasn't so much a conscious decision, more a natural reaction to a life that suddenly seemed to be caught up in a retreating tide. Looking at it objectively, every aspect of his life that held any importance was in turmoil and heroin and crack cocaine were the only means he had of reining them in. And it wasn't even especially the effect of the drugs, but more how they totally occupied his every waking moment. Whether it was planning to buy them, getting ready to buy them, sorting out the finances to buy them, redialing dealers when they wouldn't answer, scrambling into clothes to leave that very second, sprint walking for the train station after scoring... It all combines to stop you thinking about life and whatever nasty trick it is halfway through at that moment. Our entire day was then, in some way or another, a direct result of making sure our evenings were full of the drugs we craved. Then even our habitual usage took on habits. It was like one long ritual devised to stave off falling back into the sewage of daily living and all the domestic and social problems which slowly screwed in against us.

It was around that time that we stopped using my room at my mother's as a junk den. Instead, we crossed the length of the city and went back to Grayson's flat in Lambeth where we could get high in peace and not have to worry about hiding syringes or care about what time we woke the bathroom up to hit a late vein.

Our evenings also merged into a kind of routine. On arriving back at Grayson's we'd divide up the drugs, steady ourselves with a shot of brown, and then get the crack pipes struck up and smoking away. Once we'd got our bearings Grayson would take up a position, cross-legged, on the floor, in the middle of the room. He'd sit like that with his pipe to his right and his little bags of crack laid out like pebbles to his left. I would stand, my pipe up on the mantlepiece alongside a glass of water. From my phone I'd narrate a single text to him each evening. At random moments Grayson would spring to his feet and duck out the room in tears. I understood so much more about him from the blankness he left behind in the room than from what I ever felt from his physical presence. When he returned he would invariably say, “Fucka!” He was ashamed of those tears, certainly ashamed of showing them in a man's arena. He couldn't cry and carry on, whereas I could. I could walk the streets crying or turn up for work in tears. And some part of Grayson wanted some of that too. Some honesty. Some way of being human without feeling like he had lost all self-respect in the process.

After the storytelling, the conversation would invariably turn to Serena. Grayson remained adamant that the relationship was over and that it was now just a matter of disconnecting and untangling from a life together. But it was never that clear-cut, and from what I could make out, Serena was being pulled along on a chain of evaporating hope, kept at a safe distance while being soothed by the idea that things would one day be better. And with each passing day, as the different tensions in Grayson's life stretched ever tauter still, I could feel Serena's dark and brooding presence nearing closer and closer to our world.

“About Serena, I need to ask you something and I'd like you to be honest.”

“Ask away.”

“Are you sure you've not created this split just so as you can have a blowout on drugs in peace? Generally, when relationships end there is a coldness of detachment somewhere... at least for a while. But I hear you reassuring her, calming her... taking private calls... jittery if you miss a call. It doesn't sit true with many things you have told me.”

“I've thought the same. Maybe at first I did cause an argument because I wanted to get high, but things are really over now. Bt, I just can't be that cold a person... I'd die if she ever did anything stupid because of me being intentionally heartless.”

“The problem with that is that she then keeps an emotional hook in you. How could you ever really move on with your ex attached like that? But, even more serious: you're giving her hope and like that she blossoms and dies afresh each day. Hope is the worst in these situations... You're peddling dreams – dreams you tell me are dead.”

He didn't respond, and I left it at that. Sometimes we hurt people more with our kindness than anything else. What Grayson was doing was either taking the easy way out or creating a situation that he could profit from, keeping tensions high so as he had the courage to tell Serena that she couldn't come home again, and like that his place was free for me to occupy and fill the air with the toxins of narcotics. But Grayson wasn't a terrible man. He had a certain honesty. At least around me he did. And there were things in him I greatly admired. Like his unwillingness to have anyone fuck with him or take away an inch of his personal space. No matter what shape or size, if someone encroached upon him he'd have none of it. That's when you'd get glimpses of his rage. He wasn't a brawler, had probably never learnt how to throw a punch in his life. But what he had was anger and rage, and it was that combination that would made him a very formidable and difficult opponent for anyone.

After a few weeks, Grayson asked if I'd like to move in with him. I told him I wouldn't move in as I had some concerns but that I'd stay there for an undisclosed amount of time.

“Concerns?”

“Serena.”

“That's finished, I told you. I want some proper passion... not that... Not what I had with her. I love her, in a certain way, but we can't be together.”

“Grayson, I'm gonna tell you the blunt truth: I still think you have cleared Serena out just so as you can go on a mammoth drug binge. That's how it looks to me... Like you're being very selfish.”

“You're wrong. And you're even more wrong if you think I could be selfish like that. We're through... finished. I'm finished.”

“Well, time will tell. Nothing can be known here between two great fools.”

Grayson didn't reply. Instead he gave me a spare set of keys to his flat and said the place was mine too.

The spring moved on and by. We hardly noticed it but did remark that the trees were starting to fill out and that the subway ride across town to score had become claustrophobic and muggy down in those deep tunnels. That subway ride, an hour each way, that constant and monotonous jerking and chugging, became synonymous with how our days had become. Hardcore daily addiction had crept back in and we were always now a step behind time – rushing to get to the bank, to score, to pick up clean rigs, to buy extra methadone and then to get back home and forget about everything but that which was in front of us. But some things just couldn't be swept aside so easily. Firstly, there was the question of Serena and then, quite out the blue, Grayson was passed fit to return to work and was then just a weekend away from full-time employment and the disciplinary hearing that would commence the moment he returned...

At just gone seven my heart darkened. She heard me stop typing, waited for some minutes, and then asked “What's happened?”

“I need to score,” I said.

“You're kidding, right?”

“No.”

“You must be! It must be a fucking joke?! You spent all day telling me of how you had had enough... How you were going on at least a week's break.”

“I know, and I meant it... Then. But now, now I want to score. Something's happened.”

“What? What's happened?”

“Just something in the air. Did you hear the rain? Did you smell it when you opened the window? That's what happened. Something blew on in.”

She didn't speak for a moment after that. I sat staring at the words I had been writing on the computer. The light was fading and there was something sulphurous out there in the night, like the city had a whole life going on that I was missing out on. When she next spoke the room was in darkness and I was camouflaged by it.

“Well, how can you score? You've no money. You've never any money.”

“I know, but I'll have money one day. I have an article that will be ready for Monday and a few bits to collect from a few people.”

“So, you want me to pay for it?”

“No, that's not what I want. I never want you to pay for it. But you could lend me the cash until my cheque comes through.”

“And what if I don't want to? What if I ask you to just go two days?”

“Then I'll do it. I'll have no choice. But it won't change anything and those days may bring in hell.”

“You're a shit... a real fucking shitbag! I was so happy watching you write, thinking of tomorrow...”

“We'll still have tomorrow. We'll always have tomorrow. But today I'm sorry.”

She took her purse up out her bag, counted through whatever money she had in there, then closed it again and sat like that, in the dark, hoping the horror would somehow end. I pretended to be editing, but really I was staring at the clock on the computer, hoping she'd give in quickly and not make this any more difficult than it needed to be. After half an hour I broke the silence.

“So, will you lend me it or not?”

“Do I have a fucking choice?”

“You always have a choice. Come on... Get yourself ready and come with me.We can run through the rain and get a coffee up on the hill. We can look at the lights and be thankful for all the success we never had.”

“You go. I'm not going. It was so peaceful here. You keep your dreams to yourself tonight.”

“No, you've got to come. We'll ride the metro one last time and tomorrow will come so much quicker like that.”

She rose, slowly. She smoked a cigarette and she stood near the window. She scrunched her cigarette out until every ember was done cold. She went into the bathroom and she pee'd in slow motion and then washed her hands and creamed them and changed her clothes at a thread a time. She did everything slowly, wanted to run time out and to somehow stop the unstoppable. When she was finally all out of things to do she came in and took up her purse and, without making eye contact, she gave me the notes and another little piece of her waning love. I wanted to die and I wanted to laugh. I took the notes and I held her, like the first time and like forever.

Forty Euros and it doesn’t even kill you? No, thank you! I've invested a lot of money in lung cancer and pulmonary heart disease and I'm not about to blow my investment now. E-cigarettes! Fuck! What's gone wrong with us when we want all the allure of smoking without the consequences? The Marketing of the Self. That's what it is. It's why chewing-gum or nicotine patches rarely work. They look over the fact that smoking is mostly about image, that smokers are just as addicted to the personality which holds the cigarette as they are to the additives within them. Cigarettes allow us to buy further into the persona we want to project – our internal hero. And because we figure it’ll take at least 30 years of smoking to even begin killing oneself, it’s become the safest, least reckless way to advertise a sense of self-abandon. Cigarettes are fetish and I‘m as guilty as anyone of using them as accessories.

One for the lungs and one for the fashion!

Oh, my beautiful words. The poetry of reckless and idiotic youth. A Marlboro poking out my breast pocket and another behind the ear. Sweeping onto the underground with my scarves aflap, smelling of snuffed dog-ends and some other perfume from some other lover. A wildness in my eyes, my gait. The last vestiges of smoke still drifting from my mouth. Standing tight up against the doors, impatiently flicking my lighter to a spark, revealing a person out to destroy himself, someone in a hurry to suck down another lungful of youthful demise. I've never known a heroin junkie who did not smoke; I wouldn't trust one who didn't. I don't even trust the ones who do. The flirtation with death and stunted living starts there. An infatuation with self-image, style and attitude, all pulled in from a searing, smoking stick, sucked way down and blown back out as your fantasy persona clears into view through clouds of your own myth.

The cigarette.

My first erotic love.

Lying back, breathing heavy, her legs open, waiting that my tongue tastes her for the first time. Me. Between her thighs. 3am. Bare apartment. Single mattress on the floor. No electricity. Rats in the loft. Kissing up her thighs. Pushing her legs still farther apart. Her sex tingling. The entire universe and all existence collapsed down into a bud of pleasure. I take a long, slow drag from a B&H and funnel a fine flute of smoke against her swollen clit. And with the air and the warmth she groans and quivers and pushes forward, suddenly clenching her stomach for the first steep drop of the death ride. 21 and discovering ourselves, taken over by an insanity we didn’t know we possessed. An intense mournful and desperate erotic longing, pupils dilated, tears from an unknown emotion, mouths biting words of unrepressed madness and honesty.

We must die together… I can’t live without you now.

I know, My Love, I know. I’ve wanted to die so badly, but in you I want to live.

I want to live so badly too. Tell me that you'll save me, that you’ll save all of this… that tonight will never end.

Ssssh, My Darling, Sssssh… This hell is ours eternal.

2. CREDIBILITY

Oh no, not you as well, I said.

The local shopkeeper pressed a button on the side of his e-cigarette and, looking at me, sucked in and blew out, letting clouds of vapour pour from his mouth before swallowing the last of the heap down.

Voila, mon ami... That's how you evade the law, he said.

He pulled the e-cigarette from his mouth and showed it to me, pointing at the graduation marks printed up the top side. He said that he had filled it up only that morning, had been vaping away all day and still had 0.4ml of nicotine left. It meant nothing to me, but I read the reaction he sought and pulled an incredulous- looking expression like I was greatly impressed and what a shrewd investment it was.

Does it feel like smoke or is it like swallowing air? I asked

The shopkeeper wagged a demonstrative finger at me, then put the e-cigarette back in his mouth. He pressed the button once again, only this time he kept it pressed. I watched him curiously. He watched me back, his eyes open wide, the e-cigarette between his lips, button held, taking in vapour, the seconds passing and his face becoming more strained and more ridiculous by the moment. Finally he removed the device from his mouth and inhaled, instantly falling into fits of coughing, a shock of smoke sputtering out his mouth and nose. Through watery eyes he looked at me and forced a smile: It's just like a cigarette, he said. It's real smoke... Only, NOT smoke! Then he coughed some more before making a horrendous wretching sound like a bird regurgitating food for its chick.

For the first time I was kinda impressed. I'd imagined a variety of politically correct smoke that didn't touch the throat on the way down.

Fuckin' good them things and I’ll tell ya wot for as well, said a new voice behind me. I quit with mine. Smoked 50 a day for 25 year. Stopped just like that. Amazing! Has turned me life right around and I feel so much better for it.

I turned around to confront the owner of the voice. It belonged to a new customer who had entered, who then whipped out his own e-cigarette, mouthed it, pressed the GO button and sucked down a lungful of steam himself. I eyed his sallow, bloodless complexion, his tea-stained teeth and oiled back grey hair. He stood there in a full-length woollen coat, yellowed from years of tar perspiration and nicotine-filled bars. A real smoker here, no doubt. A definite potential stiff for the cancer ward. I could see him there now, his last days spent dragging around an oxygen canister as he shuffled out the lift to stand in the hospital grounds in his pyjamas and smoke himself off in style. This was no three-a-day weakling but a hardcore, lifelong smoker, all attitude gone, someone who had smoked out of habit, through the night, coughing up phlegm and lighting another and not a slither of coolness left about it. He blew his vapour over me and the shopkeeper. The shopkeeper took a drag of his own e-cigarette and returned the gesture. I stood in the middle as these two local characters blew misty kisses at one another. The vapour didn't smell much like tobacco smoke but rather of some sickly perfume you would never want clinging to your clothes.

When I was once more alone with the shopkeeper, I questioned him about his electronic stick. To each question, the shopkeeper would present me with a different part of his device, excitement lighting him up as he explained away how it worked and the genius of progress. It seemed like it was a piece of technology that he finally got better than the young. Twisting off the stem of his e-cigarette, he showed me how easy it was to refill and how to recharge it.

USB, he said, USB key!? As if asking me if I knew what one was. I nodded. Then he started going into the mathematics of the money this new-age cigarette was saving him.

Hmm, interested now aren’t you, he said, supposing everyone was as calculating with money as he. That speaks to you, don't it?!

It didn't, but I nodded as if I did, as if I was now open to the idea of an e-cigarette myself.

Standing as close to the shop counter as I could comfortably be, the shopkeeper took up his traditional position behind it and beckoned me still further forward, secrets abounding in his eyes as he leant in and whispered.

Listen, if you want an e-cigarette DO NOT buy it from the tobacconist. No, no. 50 euros from them dirty criminals. If you want an e-cigarette, my friend, come and see me. Look...

From below the counter he pulled out a package that looked like it contained two quality pens. E-cigarettes.

From me only 40 euros... for the TWO. Plus one 12-miligram refill. Brand-new best quality, he said. Just 40 euros for you, my friend.

So that was it: The Hard Sale. This mule was so het up about e-cigarettes because he was flogging them. The other goon who had come in tinged the colour of morning piss was probably his stooge.

40 euros? I'll think about it, I said.

Don't think too long, he replied. Every second with them other foul things is killing you... And your wallet! E-cigarettes: all the pleasure of the real thing without the death sentence!

He sounded like a programmed advert. God, how it sickened me. For a moment back there I thought he was genuine. This man, this little independent shopkeeper who had plead poverty over the years, who had kept me supplied in chocolate and cholesterol, who I'd remained loyal to despite his inflated prices, was now trying to sell me any old junk he got his bartering hands on. Why, only three days previous, he had sold me half-priced Albanian cigarettes. I took a carton of cheapest orange juice he sold, paid, and walking home wondered what the hell was in it.

3. A CONVERSATION

You should at least try it before you condemn it, she said. I thought you were more open-minded than that... That you‘re into everything e-dash and smart?

Not everything. And I don't need to try one. I'm sure they work just fine and that the vapour is as good as everyone says it is. But that’s not where it falls down: it's the thing itself. E-cigarettes just aren’t attached to anything or anyone or any image. That may sound ridiculous but everything nowadays comes down to that: not the practicality of the thing but what it says about us, the consumer. The Marketing of the Self, capitalism's greatest success and hold over us. It sells us fantasy and individualism through association. With all the choices we have we can construct a personality around ourselves, be whoever we want to be, except, ironically, ourselves. Some people construct that character around an empty husk, become what‘s cool and fashionable, and others construct an outward representation of their internal self, that hero they imagine they are and want the world to perceive them as. But it's all marketing and we are all victims, no less the people who claim to have escaped modern life, who live in tents and shit under trees. I can spot an eco-warrior miles off! How? Because he/she dresses in a certain style... Keeps their hair in a certain fashion. They market themselves to the image of who they want to be. We project who we are, who or what we want to be and what we're into by our clothes and accessories. Do you think modern books are designed to be read? Well, they’re not. They're designed to be shown off. It's why e-books haven't completely taken off just yet, because no one can see what you're reading. Give Kindle a back screen which displays an image of the book you're reading (even better an image of the book you're not reading) and sales will rocket. People could then show off an appetite for Jean Paul Sarte while reading of the wizardry of Harry Potter. Do you imagine there's one person on the bus or underground who is not conscious of what the cover of their book is and what they imagine it says about them? I'm sure I'm not the only one who has chosen books especially for my journey, going so far as pretend-reading the same words over and over for the eyes of others. One woman even once pulled me up on it.

Sat on the underground opposite me, smirking and looking over like I was a simpleton, she said: I say, you must be a terribly slow reader... You've been on that same book now for almost four months and you're not even a third of the way through! I smiled and said: Every great book's worth at least one half-decent fuck and this one hasn’t paid its dues yet!

And it won't today, she replied, standing up and moving away before she caught whatever stupidity it was I had. I’m telling you, it's all about image. Westerners have become obsessed with being someone in this life. It comes with the loss of religion, which is a good thing of course, but the transient period, the intermediate search for meaning and acknowledgement, is not so good. God needs a replacement. Without an omnipresent peeping Tom to distinguish ourselves to, it's only natural we become more and more extrovert as a people.

Fuck, Christ what has any of that got to do with anything? How does that stop you from at least trying an e-cigarette? They’re revo-fuckin-lutionary!

They could very well be once some rockstar takes up the habit while shooting dope or a bunch of vaping gangsters hold up a casino in some film or other. What they’re lacking right now is sex appeal. That's what will really make the e-cigarette: an identity. And even more importantly: If it can help get you laid or not. And that, that search for company, this 21st century isolation, brings it back once more to the loss of God.

Huh! Well, I think you've thought way too much about this. What a sad man you really are. There you are writing on about living such a decadent life as you do, when really you're sat at home alone, pondering over all kinds of nonsense. And, by the way, not everyone is into dead rock stars and sex appeal. Not everyone is so superficial and self-conscious as all that!

You think so? It's not important if it's a dead rock star or a sport's personality, whether it's people power-dressing for work or a 50-year old biker with no bike: it's all the same thing. And before you say it, it's nothing to do with adolescence or being immature or anything like that. And we rarely wise up, ever. We just age, shrivel up, and pass onto another marketing image. We modify who we project as we get older. We steal from what we feel are wiser, more sophisticated sources or those that will benefit better what we want from life. But it's not really about the age we are, it’s much more about the age group of the people we’re looking to attract. But, back on subject, for the moment the e-cigarette adds nothing to our marketed persona; it may even detract from it. Imagine a different scenario, one in which our paedophile cousins adopt the e-cigarette as theirs, in which vaping is known as an accessory of child molesters. In that instance, how many adult males do you think would take up vaping? Not many, I tell you. It's where anti-smoking campaigns have always fallen down in the past, by showing black lungs and hideous neck tumours. They made smoking seem even more dangerous, even more rebellious. What they should have done was associate smoking to a very uncool image, an image that'd have had kids ridiculed and bullied and young adults mocked off the streets. Instead they sold death to the young, and the young are infamous for wanting to die.

Oh, come on now, stop! Not one subgroup will ever have exclusive rights over a product. That's really fucking simplifying it.

Of course it's simplifying it. I agree it's much more complex than that but we'd never get there if we didn't simplify it. But still it happens. Look at how rubberwear is, associated to taboo and S&M, or how a certain haircut can define what music someone likes. Look at the swastika! If I were to wear one tomorrow I'd be branded a fascist and probably be beaten too.

Let’s leave swastikas well out of this. As to someone’s hairstyle or clothes, it all depends on what and how they wear them. Something as practical as an e-cigarette will maybe find its niche markets in colours and shapes??? It could be that a certain style of electronic cigarette comes to be associated with a certain type or group, but not the entire product itself.

Yes, but that’s exactly it : that's what the Marketing of the Self is. It’s exactly that! And once we've marketed ourselves right down to a specific type and colour, right at that point where we believe we've attained true individualism, that's when we've been done over completely, pigeonholed into small denominations with tastes so refined that we’re sitting ducks for specific products and ideas. At that point, as a sub-sub-sub group, the market knows exactly what to sell us and what magazines and websites we'll most likely visit or buy. It knows our morals, sexual perversions and our politics. It's why all these sub-genres exist in everything from music to art. People think it's individualism but it’s not. We're being divided up into ever smaller subgroups so as our choice of products becomes ever more defined. With a large enough wardrobe, you could go out and masquerade each day as a completely different person. It already happens: multiple interior personality disorder! People, terrified of loneliness, taking on multiple interior personalities according to the set circumstances or what people they’re with on any particular day. The phrase ‘I'm gonna let my hair down’ is a symptom of such a phenomena. What it really means is: I'm gonna abandon my serious and professional self and instead lose myself in someone quite different for some time.

Yes, yes… I understand what you're saying, but I’m wondering whether you do? On one hand, you're criticizing such association and on the other, you don't want to be seen with an e-cigarette because it's not 'rock n' roll' enough. You seem highly confused… Even more than usual.

It's not confusion. It's saying I'm as much of a victim as anyone. That I've nowhere near escaped the capitalist system. But I don't ever pretend I have. For me, the ultimate victory over capitalism will not be if you were used by it or not, but if you were conscious of being used by it or not: If you were duped or not duped. To undermine any system or order you must first become a part of it, use it against itself. A revolution is that... It's all a part of the same circle. Whatever our society becomes in the future, the free market will have played an important role in getting us there. In that way, if you believe in and strive for a fairer social and economic system, you must ultimately celebrate the role capitalism played in getting us there. You can't love the human and hate the monkey.

If you're evolution I certainly don't love the human.

Well, now you're sounding just like that bitch on the train, and I suppose you'll not let me fuck you either... E-cig, paperback or not?

And she didn't answer. She just shook her head like there was no hope left for me. Then she pressed GO and swallowed down another lungful of steam.

4. WEAKNESS

I could feel myself cracking from a long way off. I'm so familiar with that dual inner tension of desire and restraint that I now often give in immediately just to save time. I caught myself watching people with e-cigarettes, searching out any potential types, some malleable and corruptible characteristic that I could clutch on to, possess and make my own. But I saw nothing. Just idiot after idiot, holding these things like Irish whistles and sipping at the vapour like someone trying to make a single shot of whisky last an entire lifetime. When I came across a group of young clerks stood outside a bank, looking like an advertisement for menswear fashion, I knew there was little hope for me to be able to ply my sickly trade in this newly-emerging market. One of the clerks, a tall, slim, rosy-cheeked young man with blond hair, even seemed to goad me. Taking a pip-puff of his tin whistle, he blew the smoke out as if he were blowing his fringe out his eyes. Then he smirked as if I were the punchline of some joke. As I passed I heard his little crowd of cohorts chortling away with amusement, like they maybe would at a hated client who'd just lost his house and car and family on a bad investment. I was the bad investor. And lighting a fresh cigarette with the butt of my old one, I surely was.

Fucking bank clerks! I spat, looking at my reflection in the storefront window of a tobacconist’s. I'd prefer to be dead at 40 rather than have the misfortune of being one of them until the age of 60! And as my spite receded and my reflection disappeared in the glass, they came into sight, dozens of them, some dressed in black with white tops, others in sparkling pink, another in army fatigues, polka dot, glitter, gold, some fat, some thin, some long, others short, some sculpted and slender, some straight and some sober. Laid out, on display right in front of me, e-cigarettes of all shapes and sizes. I stood there staring at the wares, trying some more to figure the product out while fighting off an inner yearning to try it. My stupid head went so far as to start making deals with itself that I could smoke real cigarettes in public and take things a little easier on my body in private. I went through my options and each time opted for a death I didn't want. God, smoking is so unremarkable that it hardly matters anyway. Am I really so superficial it matters? Probably. Surely. Scratch my skin and you'll find nothing underneath. I'd probably disappear if I grazed myself badly enough. I eyed the e-cigarettes with great suspicion, thought of the bank clerks, and then eyed the cigarettes some more. Then taking a breath and swallowing my soul, I entered the shop for a closer inspection.

5. CAPITULATION

I took my first puff on an e-cigarette two days after Christmas. It had a weird sweet taste, not at all like a cigarette, but not unpleasant either. I did not buy it from the Algerian shopkeeper and neither did I opt for anything fancy or anything which resembled a real filter cigarette. It was plain black, 22 euros, and I bought the strongest liquid nicotine available. I felt like a fraud. I crept home and I charged it and I vaped covertly and mourned the sale of my bartered soul. To my surprise, it worked well. Over the following few days I went from smoking forty real cigarettes a day to no more than five. By the end of the week, as long as I was inside, tobacco had lost much of its importance. Outside, however, my cigarette fetish was as strong and as hellbent as ever. I started buying cigarettes expressly for that reason. But then two things happened, one by accident, and the other by design: The first change came when I cooked up a small fix of heroin and instead of shooting it in my veins I mixed it with my nicotine liquid and filled my e-cigarette with it. It wasn't strong, wouldn’t have killed a novice, but I could taste it and it seemed to keep me stoned without doing much more. I spent the day traveling the city and openly smoking heroin on the metro, in the street, alongside police officers, in shops and just about everywhere that hadn’t yet outlawed vaping. And it felt good. And in my mind the e-cigarette changed. It was then something subversive and secretive and I felt quite sure that everyone could tell that my e-cigarette wasn't quite smoking like any other around. Ha! It became not only a pleasure but a duty to vape outside, blowing out feint heroin fumes around the most unsuspecting of people. After such bastardization, I was no longer ashamed to be seen with such a thing. The second event came by way of complete hazard. Standing at a packed tram stop a tall young man came bouncing along, knocking into anyone who didn’t step aside. As he neared me I tensed my upper body and stood my ground. He knocked right into me and was duly sent veering off his line. He must have felt the resistance in my body as when he had regained his course he stopped and spun around.

Mind where you’re fucking walking! I yelled at him. The young man approached me with his arms flung open like he wanted some business. Or what? Or WHAT? he said as he came right up to me. With my e-cigarette pushed into the tender side of his neck, I leant in to his ear and snarled, Or I’ll empty you out right here. He must have seen some madness in me which he wanted no part of. Cool down, man, he said. It was an accident… Just an accident.

Well, mind your fucking accidents next time and never accident into me again. He backed off with his hands slightly raised. Go! Be off! I said. When he was far enough down the road he turned once more and screamed some insult at me in a foreign tongue. I just stared, all the while chugging on my e-cigarette. When he was finally gone, I heard the other people at the tram stop discussing what had happened and how he had either bumped into them or had made them step aside. And as listened I vaped, and for a moment I felt like a dangerous man.

On the short walk home from the tramway that evening I decided to pass the little corner shop. As I turned in off the road, there stood outside was the shopkeeper sucking the entrails out the arse of cigarette. When he saw me he quickly dashed the dog-end aside before putting an arm around me and shepherding me into the shop in such a way that I wouldn’t have seen the smoking butt on the floor. The man was a cloak of absolute deceit.

Were you just smoking? I asked.

He was all set to lie, then must have remembered that he believed in an all-seeing God and so made a confession.

Ah, yes, yes, he said. You’re a very intelligent and observant man! But I always have one cigarette in the evening and one after breakfast each morning. Sometimes you just can’t beat a real cigarette.
Yes, I agreed, pulling out my e-cig so as he couldn‘t help but see. Sometimes a real cigarette just cannot be beaten.

When he saw my device he washed over with a very distinct strain of sorrow, like I had caused him a great disappointment in his heart. O, but why? Why this cheap vulgar thing and not one of my beautiful vaporizors? Did you lose your mind over the New Year? Why, why, sir?

It was a present, I lied. And besides, yours don’t seem to work very well. I just caught you out there smoking away in shame.

O, but I explained all that, he said. It was just one… My allotted transgression, if you will. But never mind that— I’ve a little gift of my own for you, for your much appreciated custom.

The shopkeeper went behind his counter and bent down out of sight. I heard him rustling about and open some kind of carton. When he rose he handed me one of his electronic cigarettes and a quite devilish smile to accompany it. Here, for being such a good reliable customer. I instinctively reached out to take it. He pulled it back from out my reach. There’s just one condition, he said. If mine smokes better than yours, you must agree to buy the other one?

Oh no, I said, I don’t like such agreements… I’d not be comfortable with that.

Take it, Sir, please... It’s a gift. It’s yours. No conditions if you don’t like. But please accept it. Will you?

Under such duress I agreed. The storekeeper visibly lit up, dropped the-cigarette in a small paper bag and said with great excitement, You will see… Now you will see how much better mine are.

I took the small bag containing the e-cigarette and without buying anything, I left the shop.

Back home I took the e-cigarette out the bag ready to put on charge. As I unscrewed the vaporizing chamber from the battery, a thick dribble of saliva ran out the mouthpiece and over my hand. The sly old bastard. The entire mouthpiece was not only clogged with spit but was also heavily chew-marked. All that bending down behind the counter while making out like he was opening something was a complete charade. This wasn’t a new e-cigarette at all. It was his old one that either no longer worked or was so sodden with spittle that the vaporisor needed replacing. No doubt the shopkeeper now felt like I was in his debt, that I would find it difficult to worm out of buying the other e-cigarette without offending him in one way or another. That’s how the world often works. It pushes things our way and taxes us for them later.

That night the New Year was brittle with cold. The windows of the apartment frosted up through the night and the ice creaked and cracked and at times it was like there was no life out there at all. In the dark of the room the charger for my e-cigarette emitted a single green light. It was charged and ready to get me through until the morning. I laid on my side staring at that little light and listening to the wheezing of my lungs. Technology had come too late, and anyhow, I missed the orange glow and the magic patterns of a lone cigarette burning through the night. And with a certain resignation I reached across for my Gauloise Reds, shook one out, placed the firm filtered end between my lips and lit her up. It was a lonesome old world and my lover tonight would kill me tomorrow. But that was fine, and what‘s fine is good, and I puffed some more and sealed my rotten fate.

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